Click the icon to download the FREE Excel Campaign Calculator

What response rate will you get from your Marketing Campaign?

I’m often asked about the relative differences between different marketing communication channels and which one might provide the best return.

Of course, there are many factors that have an effect on the success or failure of any campaign (list, creative, offer, etc.) but there are some well-respected organisations that conduct research on these things and publish ‘industry averages’.

To help you gauge a likely cost and return and compare the differences between SMS, Email, Telemarketing, Fax Marketing and Direct Mail I have built an Excel tool which gives you you the ability to change the parameters of the campaign and see the likely cost and return implications.

A quick video demo’ of how easily it works;

STEP 1

First, you enter how many people you’re going to contact, what is the cost per hour of your staff/agency running the campaign and the likely revenue you’d expect to earn from each response (averaged across all responses).

STEP 2

The areas in green use industry standard figures for costs and response rates across the channels but you can amend these should you have more relevant figures for your industry sector. In particular, if you had a large direct mail campaign, you might want to up the printing costs.

STEP 3

The results are then calculated in the red area (do not change these cells). You will see the estimated total costs & revenue for the campaign and then the likely net revenue received by you.

I hope this will provide some ‘science’ behind making decisions on what type of marketing channel has the most likely chance of success for you.

FREE DOWNLOAD

The Excel Marketing Campaign Calculator is free to download (it’s in 97-2003 format so should work for most people).

Embed this Infographic on your website:

</p> <p><a href="http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/blog/2012/01/business-sms/the-rise-of-business-sms-infographic/"> <img src="http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/img/TheRiseofBusinessSMS-700px.jpg" width="700px" /></a><P>Source: <a href="http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/">Text Marketer Bulk SMS Services</a>

We’ve built a system to get around this and it’s launched today.

You can now buy keywords on our shortocde or txtUs dedicated virtual mobile numbers and we can simply invoice you so you can pay by BACS in the normal way. Then, when a renewal is due, your system will automatically email you another invoice for the next period at which point you can either choose to cancel or pay that invoice to extend the term of the keyword or txtUs number.

IS THERE ANY DIFFERENCE?

The main difference is that you can only choose renewal terms of 3, 6, 9 or 12 months using this system (you can pay month by month using our automated card subscriptions system). As you can appreciate, this has to be done to cover the additional administration cost of handling non-automated payments.

SETTING UP A KEYWORD

• Log in to your Text Marketer account.
• Go to INCOMING SMS | ADD A SHORT CODE KEYWORD
• Enter the keyword you want to check it is available
• Click PLACE ORDER BY INVOICE and complete the details for the invoice
• We’ll send you the first invoice for payment and once paid, your keyword will be set up

Using texting to invite your customers to recommend a friend is a very powerful way to achieve sales growth as people have been used to forwarding text messages since the beginning of texting itself.

For example, you could send out a text a few days after a purchase saying something along the lines of, “Thanks for your order. We hope you’re a satisfied customer. If you are, please tell your friends about us and we’ll reward you both with £10 off your next purchase. Your referral code is XYZ123″. (You can use our txtUs reply system for getting return responses).

This types of schemes have to be tailored for the particular business you’re in of course but, esepcially in today’s socially connected world, it can very quickly produce stunning results.

Top 20 tips to getting your member get member scheme right first time.

Offers

1. Reward both parties not just the existing customer or the friend. Both need to see benefit in the offer to make it worth their while.

2. The reward to the friend must be as good (if not better) than other acquisition offers in the market. You can’t disadvantage a new customer because they were referred by a friend.

3. Test different offers for both the customer and friend. Often cash (or vouchers) is king but you can instil relevance by relating the reward to your product eg a free upgrade, free month’s subscription etc. Whatever you go for, keep it simple.

4. Placing a time limit on the offer aids tracking, although consider also having an ongoing lower reward ‘always on’ to capture any ad hoc referrals

Targeting

5. Test the best timing to target existing customers. Try to target them when they’re feeling most positive about your product for example when they’ve just made their first purchase.

6. Target your customers that came through the referral scheme themselves – it’s most likely they’ll be possible about the scheme as they’ve benefited from it

7. Include the existing customer’s name in the text message – this will help reduce the assumption it’s spam

Customer tools

8. Make it easy for customers to refer & provide them with the tools – offer a microsite where they can enter friends’ details, make sure they can do it via their phone, via social media, SMS etc

9. Ensure each customer has a unique code which can be used to link their friends’ registrations to their account. Make sure customers know this code so they can pass it out to friends and don’t have to rely on friends clicking through certain links.

10. In your MGM campaigns remind customers of the benefits of your product or service and why new customers benefit from buying from you. Not all customers will remember why they use you specifically!

11. Keep referring customers up to date about their friend’s progress. They can help to prompt the friend to ensure they complete their registration or achieve any sales criteria to gain the reward.

12. If possible, set up a microsite that provides this progress information to customers. Give them the tools to encourage their friend to overcome any barriers to conversion.

13. Remember you are not able to retain any data about the referred friend, unless you have their consent. Any follow ups should ask the customer to enter their friend’s email address again to avoid any data protection issues.

Tracking & High value

14. If possible track referrals not just conversions – that will allow you to identify key referring customers, even if not all their referrals convert in to customers.

15. Consider rewarding customers for referrals not just conversions.

16. Measure the quality of new customers being referred to you. This allows you to identify customers who are referring the highest value friends.

17. Consider giving high value referrers an additional reward to encourage more referrals of the highest quality

18. Test tying the friend’s reward into more than one purchase – this will encourage repeat purchase and minimise ‘hit and runs’.

Finally…

19. Take a look at Member Get Member schemes outside your own market to see what innovation is going on there and adapt the best ideas for your own customers.

20. Remember to constantly review & optimise your scheme. Don’t just leave it to run itself!

Created by Text Marketer Ltd – Bulk SMS Text Marketing

It makes sense. Text Message Marketing is the most powerful marketing channel available today. It has the highest ROI of any channel and provides instant success. Nothing comes even close.

Decision One

Do you want to manage your clients’ SMS activities or let them run their own campaigns?

We provide the ability to do both.

- If you want to manage your clients’ activities then you simply need a Text Marketer account. Every account has the ability to run multiple databases, multiple campaigns and multiple response keywords. Everything can be labelled so you have full tracking of what’s gone on for billing purposes. In this model, you would be buying higher volumes of SMS credits from us and thus achieving very low bulk SMS prices and can therefore mark these up to charge on to your client.

- If you simply want to introduce clients to our system so that they each have their own account and run their own activities then the reseller option is for you. In this model, you sign up for an account and go to Financials | Become a Partner in your account and get a Partner Code. Each of your clients uses your partner code when they sign up (there is a benefit to them of additional free credits for this) and then you receive 10% commission on all the spend in every account, for the life of the account. (See more about reselling SMS Marketing services here).

Decision Two

Why partner with Text Marketer? Some competitors offer slightly higher commission rates.

In 2 words. Price. Experience.

We offer the lowest prices of any UK premium SMS company. Of course, that means there is a little less margin to share around compared to our expensive competitors.

Here’s a scenario. You put the time and effort into selling text marketing to your clients. Eventually they agree, great! They now type “Text Marketing” into Google and voila, we’re at the top and they come across us as the lowest cost provider. Guess who they sign up with!? Offering your clients the best value makes sense, not only because it shows your client you are recommending the best for them but from your financial point of view as well. 10% of something is better than 15% of nothing.

We are also the oldest UK bulk SMS supplier, since 1999, with 1000′s of clients. We are proven. So is our technology. It is stable and reliable. Over the years we have built up a massive help centre and even training and promotional videos which means that you can provide your clients with all the material they need with one simple link which reduces the time you have to spend.

The Final Decision

Is it really worth putting the time in to resell SMS Marketing services – it seems low value?

It is a volume business, that’s true. But the potential is huge and is growing exponentially. It is estimated that by 2016 texts sent by businesses will outstrip personal texts sent (there are 4.3 billion mobile phones on the planet!).

What we’re seeing at Text Marketer is that all companies are gradually growing the volume of texts they send. It works for them is why. It’s slowly becoming the default replacement to faxes and emails – and imagine having a small % of that market in the beginning!

Here’s a scenario. One of your customers sends 5,000 SMS’s per month for example. At current rates, that’s only £222 commission per year. But, if they continue to do that for 5 years (as SMS is simply a communication channel so is long term), it’s £1,110 commission. Put the time in to get 20 or 40 of these clients and the amounts soon add up to a substantial and sustained income. And some bigger clients can easily send hundreds of thousands of messages per month!

In Summary

- Get started now. Your clients will be thinking about it or maybe even doing it now (in which case you can offer them our lower prices)
- Decide whether you want to manage activities for your clients or become a partner (being a partner is best as allows you to grow more quickly with less time spent)
- Get an account, become a partner and get your partner code
- Start promoting SMS Marketing to your client base, using your partner code
- Build your client base by making use of our extensive self help material, tips and tricks and videos

If you need any more information please do contact us or simply read more information on reselling SMS Marketing services and see the instructions at the bottom of that page to get going automatically. Best of luck.

Although our accounts are designed to be able to run multiple campaigns, keywords, databases, etc. Sometimes, possibly for admin/accounts reasons, it is desirable to set up separate accounts for clients or departments.

CREATE A SUB ACCOUNT

Go to Financial | Create a Sub Account.

Complete the new account details and press submit.

Notes:
The ‘use this accounts pricing’ tickbox should be checked if you want to copy over the administrator account’s pricing structure otherwise it will be set up at default pricing.
The ‘Promo Code’ box can be left blank or if you have a promo code or want to use your SMS Partner code.

MANAGING SUB ACCOUNTS

Go to Financial | Display Sub Accounts.

Here you will see all the sub accounts associated with your administrator account, their account names, usernames and passwords and number of credits.

There are also quick links on the right to transfer credits from your administrator account, to login to a sub account (useful if you want to change a sub account’s settings or purchase from that account) and to delete a sub account.

Text Marketer are the lowest cost provider in the UK. Currently Salon Iris users are advised to use Text Magic, whose starting price per text is 6.8p per SMS. Text Marketer’s starting price is just 3.7p – a whopping saving of 3.1p per message sent – almost half the price!

I’m a Salon Iris user – how do I swap to Text Marketer?

The process is very simple indeed and should take just a few minutes;

1. Get a Text Marketer account and buy some credits for it then set up your Text Marketer account for domain authentication (option 1 in these instructions)

2. Change your preferred text to SMS provider sending domain to @textmarketer.biz in Salon Iris (their instructions)

3. Simply add two hashes ## to the end of the text message reminder you have set up in Salon Iris (this is to tell our system it’s the end of the message).

That’s it.

You’ll then be saving up to 3.1p for every text message reminder you send in Salon Iris.

If you need any support you can contact Salon Iris here.

Getting into your customers' mobile phone address book is the 'holy grail' of mobile marketing.

People’s mobile phones are precious to them. For many already, it’s how they organise their entire lives. And this trend is surely only set to continue – well, according to every study I’ve ever read!

Getting in to your Customer’s mobile phone address book

This should be your holy grail. Most people’s mobile address books stay with them forever, moving with them as they change devices too, automatically. Most smartphones also synchronise contacts with Facebook, Google and other social networking systems.

If you can get your business name and number into their address book, there’s good chance your customer will remember you for a long time! Also, if you send them a text message in the future, it pops up as from your company name, not just a generic number – just like it does from any friend of theirs.

How do you go about this?

It’s simple. We’ve tested this on many occasions and it works.

1. You need a txtUs virtual 07…… mobile number for your business.

2. Export all your customers’ mobile numbers from your database.

3. Send them a simple message from your Text Marketer account (using your txtUs number as the Sender ID). Something like,
“Hi from Carluccio’s restaurant. This is our new text messaging number which you can use for booking or general enquiries. Please save us to your address book“.

Done.

The benefits of doing this aren’t immediate, they’re more a medium term strategy. But, from all the evidence we’ve seen, it is simply the holy grail of mobile marketing.

In the UK, sending an SMS to a short code usually involves a 5 digit number, such as 88888 or alike.

Most people use short code SMS as a quick and easily memorable number for people to text to from advertising. For example, you could say in your advert, “text INFO to 88802″ for more information. This short code is easier to remember than sending an SMS to a full 07xxxxxxxxx number.

At Text Marketer, we offer a full short code SMS service and we are also the cheapest short code supplier, starting at just £5 per month per keyword.

A unique short code SMS service

Text Marketer also has a unique twist to its short code SMS service. You can autorespond not only with a text message but also an email. This is great for sending back information to people from an advert and also capturing their mobile number and email address. It simply works by asking the person to include both the keyword and their email address in the message.

Get more response to your adverts

Study after study has shown that including a short code SMS response mechanism in your advertising should uplift response rates by around 25% and amazingly, up to half of people normally choose to respond using the short code option.

The best short code SMS service

We’ve aimed to make our short code SMS service the best by making it the cheapest and including the unique feature of auto responding by email. Every keyword is free for the first week as well (which you can cancel at any time) because we are so confident that Text Marketer offer you the best deal.

Why not take a free test drive of our unique short code SMS service and see for yourself?

What’s the difference?

The main difference is cost. Non-UK networks charge ‘interconnect fees’ to deliver your message (as they are separate companies). This means that each message to a non-UK mobile number will cost double the amount of credits shown in the credit counter on your account.

Even though it is ‘double credits’, because of our incredibly low prices per credit, this means Text Marketer are still one of the cheapest international SMS gateways available.

Formatting international mobile numbers

If sending to non-UK mobile numbers (in an international-enabled Text Marketer account), you must ensure that you enter the number in full international GSM format, including the country code.

In most countries mobile numbers start with a zero and the easiest way to remember international formatting is “replace the zero with the country code” (you don’t need any + sign before the number).

Here are a few examples:

UK – 07657345987 becomes 447657345987
DENMARK – 024215712 becomes 4524215712
NEW ZELAND – 0211238815 becomes 64211238815
AUSTRALIA – 0211238815 becomes 61211238815

Does it affect sending to UK numbers?

No. Your account will work out which numbers are UK and which aren’t and charge you accordingly.

To enable your account for international mobile numbers, please contact us with the company name of your Text Marketer account to request the change.

What’s different about texting to landlines?

The major difference is that the text is read out to the recipient. This changes the ‘tone’ of the message completely and can feel a lot more human. The current BT ‘text spokeswoman’ has a mature, calm and professional voice which can really enhance the impact of your message. Give it a try.

Timing of your text message is more critical

The landline is, of course, not with your customers all the time ….

Think about when your target audience is likely to be home and critically, when they will receptive to your message. 7.30 am when they’re getting the kids ready for school, 6pm when they’re in the middle of cooking dinner or 11pm when they’re off to bed are not likely to be winners! And although the message will queue and keep trying to deliver, don’t send them in the day if your audience is likely to be at work so the first thing they get after a busy day at work is your message.

A great way to give a new boost to response rates

When a customer's mobile number is no longer valid, you can text their landline number and ask them to rejoin your list.

It’s a fact of modern life that people change their mobile numbers on a regular basis. If you’ve been SMS Marketing for a while you’ll notice that your delivery rate to mobiles will diminish over time. But, many companies also hold the landline number for customers which hardly ever change.

So, for customers where the mobile number is no longer valid, try a separate SMS marketing campaign to their landline numbers to give a new boost to your response rates. (Tip: you could also send a landline campaign asking people to text to join your special offers list if they are still interested, using our SMS Response system).

It’s costs the same

Texting to landlines is the same cost as texting to mobiles. There are 2 critical things to do technically when you set up a landline campaign but apart from these, it’s exactly the same.

Experiment with the message

Because the message is read out, experiment with the wording and send yourself some examples. Althought BT’s ‘spokeswoman’ is great, there’s a few words she has problems with but equally there are many words and sentences that sound fabulous.

All Text Marketer accounts can be used to send to landlines at no extra cost, you will receive delivery reports as well.

So, is it effective?

In many circumstances, yes. In truth, as with all these things, it is important to test. Follow the few simple rules about testing how your message sounds when read out by BT and thinking about the timing of delivery and you could find, if it’s right for your target market, that it’s better than texting to mobiles!

But, this can be avoided with a simple text message reminder the day before.

A recent real-world case study posted at Mobile Marketing Magazine illustrates the point beautifully;

“Global Hair Limited, in Peacehaven, near Brighton, has 4,700 clients. The company was experiencing issues with client missing appointments, creating an increasing amount of spare time for the salons stylists and costing the business lots of money in missed revenue. To address the problem, the salon deployed a text messaging solution with dramatic results, as Global Hair Director Emma Fulgoney explains.

She says:
“SMS reminders have improved our amount of no-show clients who may have forgotten the date and time of their appointment, therefore leaving a stylist in the salon with sometimes up to two and a half hours of down time, which is clearly bad for business and profits. We calculate that our number of no-shows has been reduced by approximately 70% since we’ve been using TextMagic and we expect this number to improve further as we obtain more clients’ mobile numbers.”

GET YOUR FREE SMS ALERTS SOFTWARE TRIAL

Using Text Marketer’s ‘designed for users, not technicians‘ online SMS software (a free trial account with 10 free credits is available), it can take as little as 20 seconds to copy and paste a list of numbers, write a quick reminder message and hit the send button. Texting reminders costs around 3p per message.

In addition to this, using Text Marketer’s revolutionary txtUs product means you can also receive instant replies to the messages you send (to confirm yes to the appointment or no and re-book for example) and receive all the responses in your email inbox & reply via email too.

The 2 easiest methods of integrating Goldmine with our SMS Gateway are using;

1) The email to SMS gateway – http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/email-to-sms-gateway/email-sms.htm
Or
2) The HTTP gateway – http://www.textmarketer.co.uk/blog/2009/05/sms-gateway/text-marketer-apigateway-spec/

txtUs is designed to give a business a unique mobile number (like having a fax number) which customers and prospects can use to text the company. Texts come in as a standard email to the company and can be replied to using a standard email program too.

A phenomenal success!

See how RoughTrax have integrated txtUs into their website

RoughTrax report, “customers absolutely love the system. It means they can contact us whenever they want as they always have their mobile with them and when we reply, they get our reply instantly”. Barry, Director of RoughTrax, goes on, “we’ve really noticed a surge in enquiries since we published the mobile number on our site, good ones too! Also, the time it takes us to answer using txtUs is about 10 times less than making a phone call”.

Fully integrated into RoughTrax’s contact channels ….

RoughTrax have added their txtUs number on their web site and are now reprinting their stationery to include their new number.

A real opportunity for business to gain a competitive advantage

There’s no getting away from it, this is a new system and it takes a little while for customers to get used to texting companies they deal with. But, when they do, the results are astounding.

Not only do you increase enquiries and save costs (on calling mobile phones), you gain an advantage over your competition because people like using text messaging and they’ll stick with companies who use it.

No other company provides such a unique product for business to use text message marketing in their day to day business – at only £25 per month with no long term contracts (you can cancel after month 1 if you like), there seems little reason to not at least try it.

Text Marketer have specialised in providing our lowest costs SMS Gateway to the recruitment sector for over a decade. Now, we are pleased to announce that we have developed a plugin for the industry-leading Bond Adapt software, allowing any Bond users to effortlessly change to our SMS Gateway and save up to 50% on their Bulk SMS costs.

There is no change in functionality using our SMS Gateway, just lower cost.

Our gateway also supports all other recruitment software packages so all recruitment consultants and agencies can benefit from our lowest cost SMS Gateway.

You can get going immediately by simply opening a free account and contacting us for integration options.

Using txtUs dedicated virtual mobile numbers for your business

A txtUs number gives your business a dedicated virtual mobile number which people can text (but cannot call) enquiries to or to reply to messages you send out to them from your system.

You can add as many txtUs numbers to your account as you wish and they can each have bespoke settings which can be a great solution for a small office environment or call centre where each member of staff could have their own txtUs number for their clients.

A quick 2 min Video Demo of the 2 main uses | See more videos

The unique advantage of the txtUs system is that the full conversation between you and each mobile number is sent to you via email and you simply reply via email. In essence, to answer the ‘how does it work?” question …. exactly like your email does. The only difference being of course that your replies are being sent out the customer as text messages.

Step 1 – Adding a txtUs number to your account

Login to your account. If you don’t have an account, you can set one up here.
Go to “Incoming SMS” | “Add a txtUs reply number”. Simply choose the number you want and press Place Order. This will take you through the Google Checkout system to set up the subscription payment for your txtUs number.

NEW! You can also pay for your txtUs number by recurring invoice rather than with a card

Your subscription may be cancelled at any time in your Google account and you have complete control of all payments.

Step 2 – Applying the settings for your txtUs number

Go to “Incoming SMS” | “Change reply settings” then click “Configure” next to your txtUs number. You will be presented with the screen below.

- Auto reply by SMS settings – If you would like to automatically send a text message back when somebody texts your txtUs number, you can set it here. Simply change active to ‘Y’, enter your text message and press submit.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The text autoresponse is only sent once to any individual mobile number, the first time they text in. This is to avoid them receiving the same autoresponse message over and over if you get into a conversation with them.

- Reply settings – This is where you set how your system handles the text conversations you have via email;

• Active – set to N if you do not wish to have incoming texts emailed to you
• E-mail – set the email address you wish incoming texts to go to.
• Thread Count – This is the amount of history you want included on each conversation email. For example, if you wanted to see the last 5 messages from a person and the last 5 replies you sent them you would set it to 10.
• Use as Sender default – enable this if you want your txtUs number to be the default reply number for text messages you send out from your system

- Advanced (API) settings – only used for programmers to deliver incoming message data to a script URL. Please leave this inactive unless you are sure of what you’re doing.

Step 3 – Testing your new txtUs number / Seeing a conversation in action

Send a text message to your new txtUs number then, if enabled, check your email inbox on the email address you have set (if it doesn’t come pretty instantly, check any spam filters or folders you may have enabled). You will see you have a new message from yourself.

Now reply to that email in the normal way (as you would an email). The only difference being you must end the message you send back with ##. This tells our system that it’s the end of the reply and so doesn’t send all the history contained in the email below.

You will then receive the reply on your phone. If you reply back again, check your email again you will now see the conversation thread developing.

Below is a conversation thread email for example from a company confirming a meeting:

You can also see the name of the person texting in if they are in your Address Book.

Step 4 – Promoting your new txtUs number

Congratulations! Now you are a text enabled business and you can promote your number as you would your telephone number, fax number or email address. See how we do on our enquiries page. As a customer, you are free to use the txtUs logo next to your number which adds impact and encourages use.

Other Common Questions

Getting replies from text campaigns
To enable people to reply to you, you simply have to set the Sender ID as your txtUs number. When you have a txtUs number your account will automatically do this as the default, which you can change if you wish.

You will see a new setting on your send screens, “Use Reply Number”. Simply tick this to use your txtUs number:

Charges
You are only charged for messages you send out, not for incoming messages. The cost of this is just 1 credit per 160 characters as per normal charges.

Cancellation
You can cancel your number at any time. There are no fixed contract lengths. To do this simply log in to your Google Checkout Account and cancel your subscription payments.

Logs
All of your conversations are stored in a log. Go to “Incoming SMS” | “Reply Data” to download your full log for your txtUs number.

Over the course of the 6-week campaign, 4,531 coupons were sent to mobile phones, and these were viewed a total of 8,499 times. 2,051 coupons were opened, and of these, 1,279 were redeemed against the free bottle of Sprite, giving a redemption rate of 28 per cent.

Source: MobileMarketingMagazine

Running a Mobile Coupon Marketing Campaign ‘the easy way’

It couldn’t be easier. Simply create some promotional codes and text these to lapsed customers or customers who haven’t bought for a while. If you sell online most e-commerce packages will accept promo codes – even PayPal or Google Checkout allow you to create them. If you only take phone orders that’s fine too, people will give you the promo code they received when they order.

Other useful links;

• Get a free Text Marketer account
• Text Marketer Help, FAQ’s & Tips centre
• 5 Top Tips to increase sales with SMS Text Message Marketing
• How much does Bulk SMS cost?
• Bulk SMS costs competitor price comparison chart

Step 1

Convert mobile numbers to an email address.

Basically, you just need to append “@textmarketer.biz” to the end of each mobile number to convert it to and email address to use with our system, so 07777888999 becomes 07777888999@textmarketer.biz for example. Here’s a handy Excel sheet where you can paste the mobile numbers in column A and the conversion will happen automatically in column C for you to copy and paste into your email program’s address field.

Step 2

Create the email message.

It’s mostly like creating any email message; – Enter the recipient, if you need to send the message to more than one person you will need to use the extended method.  In the subject line, use your Text Marketer username and password in the format “myAPIusername%myAPIpassword” – Write your message and simply ensure you finish the message with ##. This tells our system this is the end of the text message so it doesn’t send your signature, etc. Here’s an example;

That’s it. Hit the send button and all your text message will be sent out to the recipient immediately. Of course, you’ll need a Text Marketer account first with some credits and to get a username and password.

Note: You can change the authentication method to that of your domain instead of putting the username and password on the subject line for example if your email address is “me@my_company.com” you can authenticate against “my_company.com”. You can also change the message termination string ## to what ever you like or disable it, these changes can be made by logging in to your account and navigating to “Settings” => “Account Settings”.

SPECIAL OFFER

If you’re new to this and want to try it, use Promo Code EMAIL50 and you’ll get 50 Free Credits when you open a free account, no commitments, so you can try 50 Email to SMS’s free on us to see how easy it us. Why not give it a try? PS. There are more detailed instructions on our Email to SMS Gateway here if you want to use more advanced options.

Here at Text Marketer, stat’s are a daily routine of ours. We’re always looking at the latest trends, the newest ideas and what’s coming down the road.

In a flash of genius from one of the team they uttered, “ugh, wouldn’t it be useful to have links to all these stat’s and articles on the site?”. Thud, he was absolutely right!

Not for the faint hearted but we’ve put together links to some of the best mobile marketing articles around;

Mobile Marketing Statistics, Articles and Musings

• Text messaging in the US hits 4.3 Billion SMS every day
• 975 million mobile web users expected by 2012
• 19% of internet users now use status updates – mobile dominates
• Over half a billion people to use mobile money transfer services by 2014
• 30% of consumers communicate with brands via social networks
• 70% of print publishers step up mobile efforts
• Mobile marketing budgets growing at 26%
• DMA: ‘mobile will be the fastest growing platform for the next five years’
• IAB: ‘Mobile marketing ‘will be the best platform for younger consumers’
• Gartner Identifies the Top 10 Consumer Mobile Applications for 2012
• US mobile advertising spend 2008 – 2013
• How Much Does An iPhone User Spend On Apps? $80
• Americans Spend More Than 4.5 Hours per Month Browsing on Smartphones, Nearly Double the Rate of the British
• Average iPhone User Downloads 9 Games, Spends $7 On Them
• Android and iPhone usage patterns nearly identical
• Data Revenues Will Push Mobile Biz Past $1 Trillion
• Mobile phones to overtake PCs for web surfing by 2013
• 85% of US Internet users have cell phones – spending on mobile tech increased in 2009
• One Third Of U.S. 11-Year-Olds Have Cellphones
• Gartner: Consumers Will Spend $6.2 Billion On Apps This Year; Only $600m From Ads
• In 2010 the cellphone market will grow by 9.3 percent
• iPhone And Android Now Account For 81 Percent Of Smartphone Web Ads In the U.S.
• Revenue from mobile apps set to quadruple from 2010 to 2013
• 76% Of Users Don’t Use The Mobile Web
• Americans Sending 4 Times as Many Text Messages as Brits
• Mobile Advertising Grows By 41% in 2009
• More Than Half Of Mobile Pageviews Are To Social Networking Sites
• 2 million mobile tickets have been redeemed worldwide
• Facebook dominates UK mobile internet engagement
• One third of phones will use accelerometers in 2010
• Gartner: Mobile To Outpace Desktop Web By 2013
• 80% mobile websites attract global audience
• Mobile shopping will balloon to $119B by 2015
• Mobile marketing to reach $24B in five years, says study
• 300m fewer female mobile phone owners than male around the world
• Mobile gambling estimated to grow to USD 16.6 billion by 2011
• Mobile MVNO revenues expected to rise to USD 67.4 billion in 2012
• 68% of Americans get news and current events information on their cell
• Juniper Forecasts 15bn Mobile Tickets by 2014
• There will be 288 million mobile VoIP users by 2013
• 30.8% of smartphone users accessed social networking sites in January 2010
• Juniper Research: Mobile retail market to exceed $12 billion by 2014
• LBS Revenues to Top $12.7bn by 2012, says Juniper
• ABI Research: Enterprise mobile data revenues to hit $43 billion by 2014
• Mobile apps industry to hit $17.5B by 2012 with 50B in downloads
• Shipments of GPS-enabled handsets increased 92% in 2009
• Google sites accounted for 9% of all mobile internet page views by US users on Opera
• Mobile apps to generate $1.6 billion in revenue in 2010
• Mobile advertising spend to rise 80 percent in 2010
• Mobile Web users increase to 69.9M: Study
• Mobile Data Traffic Expected To Rise 40-Fold Over Next Five Years
• Mobile Web More Popular Than Reading
• Study: 80% Of SMS & MMS Users Report Dropped Texts
• 29% of all parents don’t allow texting during family meals. 36% of parents of teenagers don’t allow texting during family meals.
• 10% of Under 25s Think It’s Okay to Text During Sex
• Mobile Barcode scanning up 700% in 2010
• Mobile will consume 40bn gigabytes of data in 2012
• Record 77 Million Smartphones Shipped In Q3 2010, Growing 78 Percent Over Last Year
• 6.1 trillion text messages to be sent in 2010
• Mobile ad revenues to hit $3.5bn this year, $24bn by 2015
• 49% of Small Business Owners Use Smartphones
• Survey says that 20% of Americans are planning to switch to prepaid in the first half of 2011
• Only 4.8% of U.S. retailers have mobile-specific Web sites
• Research: 500M Consumers Projected To Use Mobile Health Apps On Smartphones By 2015
• App Store Tops 300,000 Applications
• Facebook generates 25% of all US pageviews in one week – excluding mobile traffic